A Tax-Time Reminder About Nonpublic Private information (NPI)
It’s the week prior to a U.S. federal tax deadline, and a word of warning is needed.
Many everyone is still furiously finalizing their state and federal income tax filings. Eventually, you’ll finish the paperwork and find it in a position to send out. If you are getting an online tool to complete your taxes, you may be lured to print a final documents to your PDF file and email it to yourself (perhaps spouse) for safekeeping. When someone is coming along your taxes, you experience prompted to request that your tax preparer email your documents to you for your personal records.
In something: DON’T.
Protecting Your NPI
The reason isn’t hard. Your tax records, whatever form they’re in, contain nonpublic personal data (NPI). Tax forms are in fact among the list of riskiest documents most people is ever going to handle mainly because they include everything-your name, address, birthdate, and Social Security number-that a name thief is required to cause real havoc in your lifetime. If you are sending a PDF as being an attachment, that attached document can easily be hijacked when participating in transit along the public Internet.
So what if you happen to do instead?
- Use the cloud. Copy the files to a secure cloud storage system. There are several free solutions available, including Google Drive, Box, Apple iCloud, and Dropbox.
- Use a thumb drive. You could fit a full lifetime’s worth of tax statements on a $10 Usb memory card. Note: if you work with a thumb drive to transfer files from a single computer to another, you should definitely work with a secure file deletion tool like Eraser or File Shredder to wipe the file should you someday misplace your drive.
- Send an encrypted ZIP file. Most file compression tools support ZIP files with 256-bit AES encryption. If you ever absolutely must email sensitive files, ZIP them program a fantastic password prior to doing so. This will sound obvious, but be sure to don’t send the password within the email in addition to the file.
- Keep it paper. The safest option to keep information online pirates will be to not place it in digital form. Using paper as opposed to electronic documents virtually helps to ensure that nobody will steal your identity through the tax filing.
Following capable of won’t necessarily ensure that you might never get hacked, but it surely will help make identity fraud probably not going by protecting your NPI.
